Summerbook #22: Sunken Lands
I loved this book. Rees has, since childhood, had a fascination with legends of sunken cities, and I get that! What's more enticing? So I've been excited to read this, and it was good stuff.
Rees is British, and the British Islands have lots of sunken lands around the edges. Former ice ages bound lots of water up in glaciers, and when those ice ages ended, the seas rose and covered coastal regions. He starts off with Doggerland, which was inundated tens of thousands of years ago, and works around through ancient forests to the Lowland Hundred, Lyonesse, and other lands that passed into legend. Then he looks at manmade land sinks, like the eastern fenlands.
The second half of the book ranges abroad, first through myth with a long section on the stories of Atlantis, and then to the ancient Roman resort town of Baiae (across the bay from Pompeii, it was not destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius, but subsided underwater as the land sank when underground magma went elsewhere) and the swamps of the southern US along with New Orleans. Naturally, while he's meditating on past ecological disasters and changes, he meditates upon our future expectations of sea level changes and so on.
It's all quite an enjoyable trip through deep time and under the surface of the water. We think of our land as pretty permanent, but it changes all the time, and the only thing we can count on is that it will change a lot more.
Sounds fascinating. I'd like to read more about the Atlantis myths for sure.
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